Second Act

Arianna Huffington was at home the other night, in her new Mercer Street loft. Mozart was playing on a sound system, and the giant room was mostly empty, except for flowers and a few clumps of Italian furniture. She was hosting a dinner party for the Huffington Post’s French edition. As guests arrived, Huffington, who wore a dark-blue dress, held out a plate of dates and apricots. “Greek things?” she offered.

There was a commotion at the door, and Huffington greeted the French journalist Anne Sinclair, the editorial director of Le Huffington Post. “Bonsoir!” Sinclair said.

“Bonsoir!” Huffington replied. They hugged, and Sinclair presented Huffington with a shiny box: “I just brought you a few chocolate Easter eggs from Maxim’s.”

Sinclair, a former television host who is often described as “the French Barbara Walters,” is best known, these days, as the wife of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former chief of the International Monetary Fund, who, in 2011, wound up in Rikers Island, after being accused of sexually assaulting a maid at the Sofitel in midtown. (While Strauss-Kahn denied the charge, which was later dismissed, he did not deny having a sexual encounter with the maid.) Sinclair became an object of fascination, not just because she bailed out her husband (an heiress, she put Strauss-Kahn up in a fifty-thousand-dollar-a-month Tribeca town house while he waited out his house arrest) but because she continued to stick with him. Pundits compared her to Hillary Clinton and Silda Wall Spitzer—associations that she resented. “I am neither a saint nor a victim,” she told French Elle. “I am a free woman.” But last year, by the time Strauss-Kahn came under investigation for participating in sex parties hosted by a Lille prostitution ring, Sinclair had moved on. She joined Le Huffington Post. Last month, she finalized her divorce.

Sinclair is petite, with a black bob and loose bangs. She was dressed all in black: blazer, wool dress, dangly earrings. She has said that the scrutiny she endured in Manhattan in 2011 made her feel like “a prisoner of America.” This time, she was more relaxed. She’d stopped into J. Crew (“I think I bought too much”), and she was delighted with her friend’s move to SoHo. “If I were living here, I wouldn’t stop shopping!” she said.

They sat down at the dinner table, and Sinclair talked about her new job, using plenty of HuffPost-friendly buzzwords: “splash” for headline, “verticals” for sections, and “pure players” for Web sites. “Launching the Huffington Post in France was really a challenge,” she said. “First of all, it was difficult to pronounce for French people. Everybody said ‘the Oeuf.’ And people still say ‘Oeuf-ting-ton.’ ” She went on, “I’m supervising the editorial team, which means that I say, ‘This is important, this is less important.’ The hierarchy”—she pronounced it the French way. Le Huffington Post also has a life-style section called C’est la Vie, which, Sinclair said, covers “psychological problems, health problems . . . a lot of subjects that Arianna loves, like sleeping.”

Huffington said, “It’s about stress reduction,” which will also be a topic at a women-centric conference that she is hosting in June. “The male way of doing success is burning out, you know, driving yourself into the ground. Then having a heart attack.”

Huffington and Sinclair are almost doppelgängers. After they met, Huffington said, she found out that not only are they roughly the same age—Huffington is sixty-two and Sinclair sixty-four—but “Anne and I have the same birthday.”

“The fifteenth of July,” Sinclair said. “We didn’t know each other before, but we fell in love.” She smiled at her new boss. “Très admirative!”

Sinclair said that she is thriving in her new medium. “Television is a show,” she said. “And the Internet is life.” She said that it reminded her of radio, where she began her career: “You’re completely in touch with everybody at the same moment.” She reflected, “I’m very happy to be living at a time of my life that I can compare all the different medias I’ve been knowing.”

Le Huffington Post has been running some gloomy headlines (last week: “L’EUROPE A-T-ELLE UN AVENIR?”), and she explained, “It’s quite difficult in France. Difficult economically. The President has a bad image. The gay marriage is a problem. And, here, the economy seems to get along better.”

Seemingly on cue, Huffington switched into pundit mode. “You know, the last jobs report was disturbing,” she said. “And sequestration hasn’t quite hit yet. So we’re not out of the woods.”

“But it’s getting better,” Sinclair said.

“Well,” Huffington said, “it’s getting better for Wall Street but not really for Main Street.”

Is it getting better for Sinclair? “My life is O.K.,” she said. “I feel good. I feel happy.” She paused. “I’m divorced.”

“Two weeks!” Huffington added, tipping her wineglass.

Sinclair smiled. “Arianna is a good—comment dit-on ‘fée’?”

“Fairy?” Huffington suggested.

“Yes,” Sinclair said. “It was like a fairy tale. Arianna came and said, ‘Do you want to work with me?’ I said, ‘Oh, yeah.’ ” ♦